Category Archives: Debt – Households / Χρέος – Ιδιωτικό

Pawnshop, the artwork that is also a board game, was set up for play, laid out on a table in her studio. It is an inversion of Monopoly: the same square board, the pieces, the bank, the cards, the dice. However in this game the player starts the game with no money, only property – jewelery, a bouzouki, antique furniture, a flat- and pays a European tax of €1500 when they pass Go (if they get that far).

Players proceed around the board, according to the luck of the dice, along a path strewn with dilemmas. A second row of squares is used to keep track of the time spent dealing with the consequences of their choices- jail sentences, or hospitalizations for example. As they move around the board, they pick one of the cards, depending on their landing square, and must choose how they will respond to the given dilemmas.

Theodorou tells me that the game is based entirely in fact. For years she has collected newspaper stories in Greece. And here they are gathered in four categories of cards – Dilemma, Involvement, Debt and Luck- to encapsulate the experience of daily life, for everyone, in modern day Greece. ”If you are honest you lose” she says.
Here an upbeat and colourful video sets out the rules.

On her website are photos of engrossed players at Bozar, Center for fine arts, Brussels; at the exhibition TWISTING C(R)ASH; at Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain « Le Commun » in Geneva; and at the exhibition It’s Money Jim, but not as we know it, at Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna, and As Rights Go By, Museumsquartier, Vienna. She says it’s important that at the beginning players laugh… but because of ”synesthesia”, the longer they play, the more uncomfortable they become, they feel the ethical discomfort in their bodies.

The clear winner of the banking union has been the German banking system: All German banks, but especially the small and medium ones, who benefitted from the establishment of a 30 billion euro balance sheet floor for banks to be subjected to ECB supervision. To obtain such condition as part of the first pillar, German minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble threatened to veto the banking union project as a whole, and it is no mystery that he was thinking precisely about banks such as the relative small Sparkassen (savings banks).

Of the 417 Sparkassen, only one is under the supervision of the ECB today; we are talking about banks that count for the 22.3% of the loans in that country for a total of 1000 billion euro.

But this is not the only way these public banks, traditionally tied to the German ruling party CDU, were protected. At least two other ways deserve mention.

The first is how the so-called Institutional Protection Schemes (IPS) were kept outside the European regulation. IPS are systems of mutual protection and guarantees of the associate banks, regulated via a contract. They exist in Germany (Sparkassen and Volksbanken), Austria (Raiffeisen banks) and Spain (saving banks). IPS aren‘t banking groups, nor banks networks. Hence, they are not directly under the European discipline—the European Directive on capital requirements [CRD IV] does not even mention them—nor the Basel Accords. This is how Thomas Stern, expert for banking regulation at the Austrian Financial Markets Authorities, characterized the situation: “The decision of the European legislator to not extend the regulation about capital and liquidity to the IPS is remarkable and hard to understand from a prudential point of view.” Stern wrote these lines in 2014, but the situation is hardly improved since then.

In the process, we will broach such salient topics as (1) financialization and the global financial crisis; (2) creditor power, the morality of debt and the social implications of rising personal indebtedness, including its interaction with questions of class, race and gender; (3) the politics of public debt, austerity and North-South relations — from the “fiscal crisis of the state” in the 1970s and the Third World debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s to the recent turmoil inside the Eurozone; and (4) the different forms of debt resistance and anti-austerity protest that have emerged over the course of the past decades, as well as the prospects for meaningful debt relief and democratic renewa

Private as well as sovereign debts have prevailed in the UK, the US and other advanced capitalist countries for the last three or four decades. Private debt to GDP ratios, according to analysis by Jorda et al. (2014) based upon historical data from BIS, increased from the 50-60 percent range in 17 selected advanced economies by 1980 to 118 percent in 2010.

Mortgage/equity loans) are the chief areas causing private debt, followed by higher education, vehicles and credit cards. Australia, Denmark, the Netherland, the UK and the US experienced a housing-induced boom (see Fernandez and Aalbers, 2016, pp. 75-6). ‘Middle class’ aspiration in post-World War II boosted these high-debt liberalised housing economies. The growth of mortgaged home ownership and steep house price rises as the result of high demand helped the financial sector to grow.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT or Modern Money Theory, also known as Neo-Chartalism) is a macroeconomic theory that describes and analyses modern economies in which the national currency is fiat money, established and created by the government. The key insight of MMT is that “monetarily sovereign government is the monopoly supplier of its currency and can issue currency of any denomination in physical or non-physical forms. As such the government has an unlimited capacity to pay for the things it wishes to purchase and to fulfill promised future payments, and has an unlimited ability to provide funds to the other sectors. Thus, insolvency and bankruptcy of this government is not possible. It can always pay.”[1]

Professor William F. Mitchell discusses the theoretical and political background of the austerity policy. Helsinki University 9th October 2015. Mitchell works as a professor of economics at the University of Newcastle, Australia and as a director of the Centre for Full Employment and Equity. Mitchell’s latest book Eurozone Dystopia (2015) traces the origin of the flawed macroeconomic framework that rendered the Eurozone dysfunctional by design. In the book Mitchell lays bare the foundations of neoliberal “groupthink” that has locked the Eurozone into a destructive path towards persistent stagnation and rising social instability.

The vast majority of the older borrowers (73%) took out student loans to finance their children’s and grandchildren’s education. About 210,000 of the 867,000 borrowers who are 65+ owe loans under the Parent PLUS Loan program (current rate: 6.31%), the only federal program that lets parents borrow for the undergraduate education of their kids.

Let us be direct with the question that faces us today. Why are US, UK, and Japanese Millennials failing to realize their potential at just the moment we need fresh leadership on the global stage?

Millennials in these three countries, whose combined economies account for approximately one third of global GDP, are struggling to fulfill their potential due to structural economic constraints and a broadly shared perception that “the game is rigged.” They are also victims of circumstance. This is the generation that has come of age in the long shadow of the global financial crisis — a historically significant loss of global wealth and opportunity — and their problems have been compounded by the automation of many tasks.

Older Americans Over 60 now Drowning in Student Loan Debt
A new report shows older Americans are drowning in student loan debt as they try to help their children and grandchildren pay for school. Sean Dowling (@seandowlingtv) has more.

The main reason why households raise debt is that they buy homes or consumer durables, such as cars. Hence, household debt cannot be viewed in isolation from household wealth.
A well-developed financial system

Households’ access to mortgage their wealth varies considerably across countries. Compared with other countries, it is relatively easy and inexpensive to borrow against wealth in Denmark. One of the reasons is that Denmark has a very well-developed financial system. For example, the mortgage-credit system allows homeowners to raise inexpensive loans using the home as collateral. The development of new loan types, such as adjustable-rate and deferred-amortisation loans, has also played a role, as the introduction of these loan types has contributed to increasing house prices and thereby also debt.
Large pension wealth

Danish households differ from households in most other countries in that they have very large pension wealth. This means that many Danes can look forward to relatively high income after retirement, which reduces their need to be debt-free when they retire.